The bittern’s eerie, booming call sounds like a lament, a tangi ringing across the marshes. Now, the birds themselves are in trouble.
Around the country, Birds New Zealand branches are trying to motivate their members to fill in one more observation list, while keen birders are ticking off grid squares, aiming for high scores. They’re working on the Bird Atlas, the biggest-ever citizen-science project on our shores.
They arrived here from Australia without fanfare, flying across the ditch for no reason anyone has been able to deduce. But they liked the look of the place, decided to stay, and started a family. Now, they’re one of New Zealand’s most successful bird species.
Takahē numbers are rising by 10 per cent a year. The problem now is where to put them.
Twice the kākāriki karaka has returned from the dead. Orange-fronted parakeets were declared extinct in 1919 and again in 1965, but each time, the birds were concealed deep in the beech-forested valleys of Nelson and Canterbury. Now, the bird is approaching its third extinction, and this time, rangers have already scoured the valleys for hidden strongholds. This time, there isn’t a secret population waiting in the wings.
Deep in the Mackenzie Basin, the world’s rarest wading bird roams free in the wild, unaware that behind the scenes, a handful of people are trying to solve a problem: how to protect a species that refuses to be contained?
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